Innocent Fancy
TheShelley Society met on the second Wednesday of the month. Though it had no formal home, the society would usually congregate in the lecture theatre of University College London, on Gower Street in Bloomsbury, from October through to June. There its members were regaled with long, meandering papers about the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his circle.
The society’s founder and unofficial leader was Dr Frederick James Furnivall, a sturdy, cheerful old fellow with an unruly beard and a long, wispy mane. At Cambridge, he had been a first-class oarsman, though never more than a second-class student. Instead of dreary academics, his talents lay in his ability to organise a crowd and enliven a discussion. He was a flirt, a dabbler, and a dandy. People liked him and he liked them.
One chilly December afternoon in 1885, while out on one of their Sunday walks across Hampstead Heath, Dr Furnivall and his friend Henry Sweet began discussing the merits of Shelley.
‘Why not found a Shelley Society?’ Sweet asked his friend. After all, Dr Furnivall was known throughout the land for his relentless energy in founding literary societies. Until recently, he had been an editor of the new Oxford English Dictionary. For this and other work, he had received honorary doctorates from Oxford and Berlin—a fact of which he was rather proud. At first Dr Furnivall seemed taken aback by the suggestion. He had previously founded societies for the study of historical masters such as Chaucer and Shakespeare. But he had also recently founded one for the study of Robert Browning, who was
not only alive but a good friend. So why not one for Shelley? The old man drew in his breath and gave Sweet a quizzical look, eyebrow cocked, before letting out a sharp exclamation.
‘By Jove! I will,’ he barked, slapping his companion on the back. He saw ‘no good reason why it should not be established, and several good reasons why it should’.
The next morning, Dr Furnivall called on William Michael Rossetti at his Bloomsbury townhouse. Brother of the famed painter and sonneteer Dante Gabriel and the poet Christina, Rossetti was a celebrated writer and critic in his own right. He was also a firm admirer of Shelley’s, having edited his poems for publication in 1870 with a revised and much expanded edition following in 1878. Once Dr Furnivall had explained his plans over tea, Rossetti was firmly on board. This would not be an exclusive intellectual affair like the Society of Antiquaries. Nor would it be a political dining club with literary pretensions, as the Johnson Club had become under the influence of William Gladstone. Rather, Dr Furnivall and Rossetti decided that the Shelley Society would be an egalitarian association, open to men and women of all stripes, so long as they could afford the annual subscription fee of a guinea.
That same afternoon, the pair got to work recruiting a small core of patrons. The following morning Dr Furnivall drew up a prospectus for forming the society, outlining its aims and rationale. Though he had founded literary societies before, those were, for the most part, respectable and scholarly organisations. They produced neat and utilitarian editions of obscure manuscripts which attracted little interest beyond the chalky philologists and bibliophiles who haunted the reading room of the British Museum like the unquiet spirits of the long-dead authors they studied.
A Shelley society was an altogether riskier proposition. Dr Furnivall was resolute that contemporary literature, no less than the great books of bygone centuries, merited serious and sustained reading, but he was ahead of his time. No respectable gentleman thought of English literature as a subject fit for academic study. Such books were a
hobby to be pursued in one’s spare time, the subject of casual discussion at the tea-table. At university, one may have read Shakespeare or Dryden or Pope for pleasure; but one studied Virgil and Horace and Homer. During the long and acrimonious debates about whether English literature ought to be admitted to the curriculum at Oxford, the grouchy Regius Professor of Modern History, Edward Augustus Freeman, cautioned against a slippery slope. ‘We cannot examine tastes and sympathies’, he argued. What measures would be put in place to ensure this new discipline would entail ‘the study of great books, and not mere chatter about Shelley’?
The statement speaks volumes about Shelley’s reputation. Since his death in 1822, the poet had been denounced for his atheism, for his political radicalism, and for what the critic Matthew Arnold euphemistically called his ‘irregular relations’. For tightly buttoned readers, knowledge of Shelley’s scandalous biography tarnished the allure of his poems. Ever an arbiter of public taste, Arnold dismissed Shelley and his writings as ‘not entirely sane . . . The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.’ In Arnold’s judgement, it was simply impossible to admire the writings of man who led such an unpalatable life. The popular press was more succinct, describing the poems and plays as ‘the foul and unnatural ravings of a diseased and morbid imagination’.
How shocking, then, that Dr Furnivall would consider forming a society devoted to this ‘ineffectual angel’ of English poetry. As far as he was concerned, though, ‘chatter about Shelley’ was anything but ‘mere’. Nor did he believe that Shelley’s life tainted his writings; quite the opposite. As he explained in the prospectus, ‘Next to the love of Shelley’s poetry comes the love of Shelley himself.’ And like the great man, any members of the society must be willing ‘to assert and promote liberty and independence of opinion’ against the priggish sensibilities of critics like Arnold. To those with a certain cast of mind, it was an attractive proposition. Within three months, Furnivall was collecting
subscriptions for one hundred and forty-four members. By the year’s end, the membership had swollen to above four hundred.
The Shelley Society’s inaugural meeting took place in the Botany Theatre at University College London on the evening of 10 March 1886, Ash Wednesday. When asked about it the following morning, most were inclined to agree the event was a resounding success. Hundreds of people from all walks of life had crammed into the theatre. There were the usual Bloomsbury housewives with time on their hands and literary men from the British Museum; but among the familiar faces was a scattering of wild, radical types, such was Shelley’s appeal. The German-born poet and biographer Mathilde Blind was present, chatting away with her friends and mentors. A few rows along sat the bushy-bearded F. S. Ellis, a keen- eyed antiquarian bookseller and publisher of works by William Morris and the PreRaphaelites. There was the actress Alma Murray, whose startling looks and exquisite voice—‘bright, melting, ringing, or thrilling, at command’, according to Robert Browning— set her apart from the throng. At the back of the theatre could be spied Edward Bibbins Aveling, a well-known biologist and, somewhat controversially, common-law husband to Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor. Aveling, the hot-headed translator of Das Kapital, founder of the Socialist League, and vice-president of the National Secular Society, was as seductive to radicals in the room as he was repellent to the usual assemblage of philologists and bibliographers.
Mingling at the centre was the mischievous young Irishman George Bernard Shaw, described by another attendee as a ‘tall lank figure in grey flannels, with a flaming head and beard’. Dr Furnivall was fond of Shaw, who was, in his own words, an ‘inveterate public speaker, and could always be depended on to enliven a discussion’. On this occasion, Shaw was gleefully introducing himself to the ‘pious old ladies whose subscriptions kept the societies going’ by announcing that, ‘as a good Shelleyan’, he was ‘a socialist, an atheist, and a vegetarian’, pausing for dramatic effect after each statement. ‘Three damned good reasons why he ought to be chucked out’, grumbled
Henry Arthur Jones, a few seats away. Two prim ladies resigned their membership in shock. Over the coming months, the newspapers would latch on to this odd array of ‘snobbish swellish supercility in early summer suits, enthusiastic votaries of the poet, shabby dramatic parasites, a few angular blue stockings with the indispensable pince nez, and one or two real artists’ who attended the society’s gatherings. Hushing the crowd into silence before introducing the inaugural speaker, Dr Furnivall took a moment to explain the aims of the society. They were threefold. First, it would endeavour to increase public knowledge of Shelley’s life and works, which had been much besmirched in recent years. Second, it would stage his unperformed plays for the first time. Third, it would reprint in facsimile the rare first editions of his works, which all members would receive as part of their subscription. Enthusiastic muttering rippled across the theatre at that last piece of news. Everybody in the audience loved books, especially rare books. First editions were so difficult to find; these facsimiles were the closest many would get to owning the real thing.
The Rev. Stopford Brooke, notable Shelley enthusiast and preacher of some repute, used his address to reflect on the aims outlined by Dr Furnivall. Joining such a society will, he suggested, bring us ‘face to face with those persons who, while they really care for poetry, do not care for Shelley’s poetry. I can imagine Mr Matthew Arnold, who is such a person, being even distressed in mind, or perhaps contemptuous, when he hears of this society.’ While he used much of his lecture to attack Arnold’s philistine sensibilities, the real object of the Rev. Brooke’s enthusiasm was the programme of facsimile printing set out by Dr Furnivall: ‘it pleases us to have facsimiles of the first editions of Shelley, and other bibliographical curiosities’, he admitted.
I do not say that this is a very high ambition, nor that it has anything to do with love of poetry; yet it is a harmless and innocent fancy, and just as good as the little fancies other folk may have about great men for whom they care. A lover likes everything that puts him in mind of his mistress, even a picture of the room she dwelt in, and we may like to see how Shelley clothed his books. For in this case there is a distinct
interest. Shelley looked after the ‘get-up’ of many of his poems and pamphlets himself, above all those that were printed in Italy, and we seem to touch his personality in these examples.
To touch his personality. Inhabiting the mind of the poet through his writings was all well and good, but nothing could match the sensory thrill of skin against paper. As the Rev. Brooke spoke those words about the allure of Shelley’s books, a serious-looking young man at the front of the auditorium appeared to shuffle in his seat: in his twenties, neatly dressed in dark worsted, a pair of little round spectacles perched on his nose and a bowler hat in his lap, dancing nervously upon his knees. His name was Thomas James Wise.
According to whom you asked, Wise went either to one of the established public schools or to the City of London School, a modern but academically excellent institution on the banks of the Thames. From their meetings at various Shelley Society events, George Bernard Shaw recalled he was ‘slim, well-proportioned, well- dressed, and passed as a university graduate’, though precisely where he had studied remained a mystery. He said little about his family but, at rare candid moments, claimed descent from the ancient Irish line of Wyse. Apparently, his grandfather’s cousin, Sir Thomas Wyse, a diplomat and distinguished mp, had been a friend to Shelley during the poet’s residence at Dublin in his teenage years. It was a charming anecdote. ‘Rather a distant relationship certainly; but it is a bit interesting to myself to reflect that a Thomas Wise was supporting Shelley upon the platform upon the occasion of his fi rst appearance as a public man, whilst a Thomas Wise is among the warmest of Shelley’s admirers today.’ As Wise later explained, his grandfather had changed the spelling of the name and that ‘simpler form’ was continued by his own father and by Wise himself.
The truth was rather different. At the time of that first Shelley Society meeting, Wise was lodging with his father and youngest brother on Devonshire Road in Holloway, in a snug terraced house a short walk east of Finsbury Park. For the past decade, since his sixteenth
birthday, he had been working as a humble clerk at Herman Rubeck and Co., a modest firm trading in colonial goods: tea, coffee, sugar, herbs, spices, essential oils, and the like. There is no record of any connection to Irish aristocracy. There is no record of him attending university. There is not even any record of his schooling besides the later claims of his brother that ill health had prevented Wise from receiving a formal education, and that he was taught at home, away from the other boys.
When Wise’s mother died of consumption in 1871, Thomas was aged just twelve. Her influence lived on in his love of books. As a boy, Wise would read to his mother in her sickbed, particularly poems by her beloved Shelley. After her death, he began to pick up odd and occasional pamphlet editions of the poems over which he and his mother had bonded, reminders of a stolen future. Not until he began working at Rubeck and Co. did collecting become a full-time occupation. Instead of catching the morning omnibus, Wise would set off early and walk the four miles to work, saving his pennies for the way home, when he would riffle through the untidy stacks in the second-hand barrows propped up along Farringdon Road. Among the street-side fruit traders and bric-a-brac men, Wise started to assemble the foundations of his library.
The same commercial instincts that saw him excel in his day job came in very useful while prowling for bargains. Once he plucked up the courage to step through bookshop doors and explore the hidden worlds within, Wise soon discovered his niche. He recognised that he would not be able to afford any of the rarer sixteenth- or seventeenthcentury books: works by the likes of Shakespeare and Milton were far too expensive for a junior clerk, even in poor condition, and older books were scarcer still. He learned that there was little demand for damaged or incomplete titles, no matter how rare, and resolved to stop buying books that were not in perfect condition.
He did, however, sense a small, growing market for good copies of more recent titles, little pamphlet poems that did not look like much but were first editions or from small, private print runs of minor works by popular authors of the day. ‘The true book-hunter considers
himself a discoverer rather than a purchaser,’ wrote John Herbert Slater a few years later, ‘and it is the essence of his skill to find value in those things which in the eye of the ordinary possessor are really worthless.’ Wise possessed this skill in spades. He bartered and bought from the cheaper stalls and, when occasion demanded, sold at a small profit some of the rarities he discovered. Nobody could hope to get rich by freelance bookrunning, but it helped make a potentially expensive habit a little bit more affordable.
Bookshops became a haven to Wise, a welcome escape from his dingy quarters in Holloway. His favourite haunt was the modest but well-curated shop of Bertram Dobell, on the Queen’s Crescent in Kentish Town. Dobell and his fellow booksellers were only too happy to entertain this thoughtful teenager, with his questions about bindings and watermarks and rare editions and private sales. When he wasn’t asking questions, Wise was skulking behind shelves, thumbing through copies of nineteenth-century poems and listening to the booksellers as they gossiped about the market and who sold what to whom for how much. Sometimes they would chuckle at the misfortunes of a dealer who let a rare edition slip through his fingers; sometimes they would sigh and whistle over another who bought valuable works at a bargain price. Here he received an education that far outstripped his informal schooling. The more he learned, the more eagerly he bought and sold and reinvested in his growing library.
It would be no exaggeration to call young Wise an addict, for books very quickly became the air he breathed, a way of masking childhood grief and projecting a bold new vision of himself to the world. By his eighteenth birthday, the allure of the beaten-up editions lining his room in the family home had begun to fade. He was ready to start investing in big ticket items. His first such purchase was a job lot: a substantial twenty shillings for first editions of Thomas Moore’s novella The Epicurean and Shelley’s unperformed tragedy The Cenci. If Wise sought to ‘touch the personality’ of Shelley through his books, as the Rev. Brooke put it in his inaugural address, this first edition of The Cenci was an opportunity too good to pass up—printed in Livorno
under the supervision of Shelley himself during his Italian tour, in a limited run of only two hundred and fifty copies.
By the age of twenty-five, the determined young bibliophile was hunting down mint copies of desirable books and buying them for record sums with his hard-earned money. He invested £45 in a pristine copy of Shelley’s elegy for John Keats, Adonais, one of a hundred printed at Pisa and wrapped in decorative cobalt papers. Soon thereafter he bought another pair of Shelley first editions from the Scottish booksellers Kerr and Richardson for £40, both in fine condition and in the original wrappers: precisely the sort of detail that Wise had learned to look out for and to treasure.
For a young man on a budget, Wise quickly made a name for himself among London’s booksellers. Because his ambitions as a collector outstripped his means, Wise spent much of his spare time bartering and selling items from his library. At weekends and in the evenings, he would trudge from shop to shop, building relationships with all the dealers in town, from the humble barrow-men to the titans of the West End. Touring the choice establishments, he also began to encounter his rivals: wealthy gentlemen who bought up all the rarest and most valuable materials before Wise could even make an offer. As his tastes became ever finer, Wise found himself in the awkward position of not being able to afford exciting new books for his collection, of becoming embarrassed by the imperfect volumes he had once proudly foraged from the streets of Farringdon. If he wished to expand his library—and he wished for nothing more—he would need to look beyond overpriced Mayfair dealers to pastures new. And surely the most fruitful territory, he rationalised, would be the untapped boxes of letters and manuscripts kept by the poets, their friends, and their descendants.
If Wise hoped to track down those materials, he would need to make connections. So he masked his sharp cockney accent as best he could, paid his guinea subscription fee to the Browning Society, and, through its activities, was introduced to Dr Furnivall. Ever the kindly gentleman scholar, and perhaps sensing that Wise was not quite as
well-connected as he liked to make out, Dr Furnivall took the young collector under his wing. After a few months he introduced this latest protégé to Browning himself. When the pair called on the poet one morning in the spring of 1886, they discovered him in the front room. Cobwebs clinging to the cuffs of his shirt, he had a dusty leather trunk open before him, bursting with old papers and pamphlets, handfuls of which he was blithely tossing into the fire.
Wise was distraught, much to the amusement of Dr Furnivall, who had known this lion of the literary establishment for many years and long since given up trying to sway his foibles. And then something quite extraordinary happened. They saw Browning pull out a pair of unassuming, slim pamphlets from the case, bound in drab cardboard with white paper labels pasted to the covers: two copies of his earliest printed poem, Pauline. Furnivall said nothing but Wise paused, heart thumping against his ribs, tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. It was an exceedingly rare book. In all his years of searching, he had never so much as seen a copy before. Now there was not one but two within his grasp. ‘Had I upon the instant asked Browning for one of them, I am convinced he would have given it to me,’ he later recalled. ‘But delicacy forced me to hesitate, and I allowed the opportunity to pass.’ He said nothing, and the book slipped through his fingers.
A few days later, still kicking himself for his lack of initiative, Wise was invited to dinner by a rival collector, James Dykes Campbell, at his flat in Kensington opposite the park. They were joined by Browning. After dinner, Campbell and Wise sat in the study smoking and discussing bookish topics, with music from the bandstand floating through the window. Meanwhile, Browning strolled around the room, arms behind his back, perusing the contents of the bookcases which lined two of the walls.
‘I see you have everything of mine, Campbell,’ he nodded approvingly.
‘No,’ Campbell replied after a moment. ‘I still lack Pauline.’
‘Oh, that gap can soon be filled,’ the poet responded airily: ‘the other morning I happened upon two copies of it; one of them shall be sent to you tomorrow.’
Wise could not believe his ears. ‘Here was an opportunity for me to ask for the other copy,’ he reminisced. ‘But once more modesty restrained me, and again I allowed the moment to pass.’ Truthfully, it was more than modesty restraining Wise. He was held back by a potent cocktail of shame, anxiety, and fear. All this time he had been lying about his background, lying about his education, lying about the depth of his pockets. His passion for books had carried him this far. But begging for a copy of Pauline was hardly the behaviour of a gentleman. There was always the possibility that it would mark him as the outsider he truly was. The risk was too great. Once again, Wise held his tongue and looked on at Campbell with envy.
After a restless night’s sleep, though, Wise could not stop thinking about the book. Had he not been there when Browning unearthed the copies? Was he not more deserving of it than his rival Campbell? Something needed to be done. Swallowing his nerves, Wise marched over to his little desk, whipped out his pen and a small sheet of paper and began to compose a letter. Dr Furnivall had already suggested to Wise that he write a simple note to Browning, asking for the pamphlet in return for a generous donation to charity. No gentleman could refuse such an offer, Furnivall had said. But the old poet’s reply, when it came a few days later, was filled with regret. Alas, Browning explained, having already given one of the copies to Campbell, he was now keeping the other as a memento for his son.
Although this came as a bitter disappointment for Wise, on reflection all was not lost. It dawned on him that while he had failed to secure this particular volume, he had caught a glimpse of the gems that awaited tenacious collectors who ventured off the beaten track. And more importantly still, his humble origins had not been discovered. His chance would come.
When the decision was made to found the Shelley Society, young Thomas James Wise was naturally one of Dr Furnivall’s fi rst recruits. He quickly secured responsibility for the society’s facsimile reprints of rare editions, a subject close to his heart. Under the auspices of the Browning Society, Wise had already overseen a facsimile reprint of
the same Pauline edition that Browning had kept from him, producing four hundred copies for members and, in the process, creating a makeshift plug for the gap in his own collection. But it was very clear that Browning was uncomfortable with the reprint, and consented to it only as a ‘concession to the whim of the more than friendly members of the society’. No further reprints would be allowed.
There was to be no such meddling with the Shelley Society’s reprints, for the object of their veneration was dead. Besides the sporadic intervention of Shelley’s son, Sir Percy, who asked the society not to reproduce some of the more scandalous writings, Wise would be free to print whatever he saw fit. He started immediately. Within a month of Dr Furnivall’s fateful stroll on Hampstead Heath, Wise had drafted an introduction for a reprint of Adonais. He showed it to the society’s founder on 6 January and, at his recommendation, sent it the following morning to Harry Buxton Forman for further comments.
Wise had been aware of Forman for some time, but had only met him recently: a sober, serious fellow, though generous; slow to smile, though quick to offer encouraging words to a novice. Little did Forman know that, in the following decades, this novice would become the domineering figure in his own field. Early on, the two of them had been rivals at Dobell’s bookshop, the senior collector snapping up all the finest items before Wise could get a look in. From the talk of the town, Wise understood that Forman, who had recently completed his own multivolume edition of Shelley’s works, was now compiling a catalogue of rare Shelley editions. At the end of his letter, Wise added a postscript. ‘By the way Dr Furnivall told me that you had very kindly expressed your willingness to shew me sundry of your Shelley treasures. I need hardly tell you I should appreciate such kindness most highly.’
Four days later he received a reply. ‘The line you have taken in your introduction is the right one,’ Forman began. But the details, he thought, were slapdash. Wise needn’t be so hasty in his writing, he explained: ‘the first principle of our society should be to issue nothing that has not received the sanction of the committee. Accuracy, good taste, and finish, are of infinitely greater importance than hurry. In
fact there is no hurry.’ The truth of the matter is that Wise was eager to get to work. There was much he wished to accomplish.
For his edition of Pauline, Wise had employed Richard Clay and Sons. A well-known printing firm with a massive range of equipment and typefaces, they proved more than capable of producing the pamphlet in facsimile. ‘In all respects save the paper, which it has been found absolutely impossible to match exactly, the present reprint may be considered a very good and precise representation of it,’ Wise boasted of the Browning volume when it was delivered to subscribers. At this stage he knew little about the mechanics of printing, but he learned fast.
Clay and Sons proved adaptable, proficient, and, most importantly, willing. Wise would stick with the firm for his new series of Shelley reprints. Despite his injunction to slow down, Forman’s revisions were quickly incorporated into the introduction for Adonais. In the week following the inaugural Shelley Society meeting, Wise spent all his free time poring over the proof sheets and correcting them against his copy of the original edition. He was meticulous. A margin increased by a sixteenth of an inch here; a capital letter made a point or two smaller there. No detail was too minute. All the work paid off. Within the month, three hundred copies of the finished book were ready for subscribers, who received the volumes with glee.
This was only the beginning. With the sort of energy that only the young and ambitious can muster, Wise set about printing facsimile editions of two more Shelley titles: Alastor and Hellas, the second of which Wise proudly claimed was ‘as exact a representation as it has been found possible’, with each ‘printer’s error, dropped letter, or other peculiarity of the original being carefully retained’. Besides the facsimile reprints, he was supervising the production of other Shelley Society titles, including Forman’s bibliography and an edition of The Cenci to accompany the society’s once-in-a-lifetime production of the play at the Grand Theatre in Islington. With the enchanting Alma Murray in the lead role, the occasion drew an audience of nearly three thousand. In Browning’s own words, it was ‘perhaps the most distinguished and critical’ audience ‘that an actress has ever played to,
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completely representing as it did the intellectual élite of the time’. And there, among the great and the good of literary London, within spitting distance of Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning, and George Bernard Shaw, sat the awkward young clerk from Holloway.
Printing these facsimile volumes must have seemed innocent enough at fi rst. They hurt nobody and made some rare and expensive books accessible to hundreds of enthusiasts. Had they been available in his boyhood, Wise would doubtless eagerly have snapped them up. But that innocence was not to last. In the autumn of 1886, while hard at work on a reprint of The Necessity of Atheism, one of Shelley’s most provocative tracts, Wise received word that Sir Percy, worried about a potential scandal, had requested he abort the edition. The news came as a severe blow. Much of the cost of printing came from the process of typesetting, which was already complete. His aim had been to print off three hundred copies for members of the Shelley Society, which would now be impossible without Sir Percy catching wind of it. Strictly speaking, Wise ought immediately to have sent word to the printer to break the type and forget all about the job. But what harm could there be in running off a single copy, Wise thought, purely for his own collection? Or perhaps two or three? Nobody would ever need to know.
Perhaps it was only ever intended as a one-off. Perhaps he justified his action as a cheerful act of defiance against Shelley’s censorious son and heir—very much in the spirit of the poet himself. And yet, when the next legitimate facsimile was scheduled for the press, in another limited run for members of the society, Wise succumbed once again to temptation. Without telling his friends, he slipped across to the print shop and asked the workmen to run off a few extra copies on upmarket paper and vellum, removing any mention of the Shelley Society from the imprint and replacing it with the enigmatic notice ‘printed for private circulation ’. He rationalised that the type had already been set up and, as he was supplying his own paper for the extra copies, it barely cost the Shelleyans a penny. He could then wait
a few months before selling these additional copies to subsidise his own collection.
Although Wise was not strictly doing anything illegal, his behaviour could hardly be described as honest. Such petty moral scruples never seemed to bother him. Maintaining his obsession was in his eyes a simple matter of calculus. He wanted to expand his library. To do so, he needed more money. He was prepared to tell a few white lies and act a little ruthlessly to earn that additional cash, which he could then plunge back into his collection. Perhaps more significantly, though, Wise had been accepted, if not embraced, by this strange corner of the literary world. And with every fibre of his being Wise wanted to belong. He knew his position was precarious, grounded in his capacity to buy and barter interesting copies of desirable books. Without money, his ability to ferret out rare editions would amount to nothing. If his reputation as a book-hunter fell away, so too would his access to Browning and the refined literary community that surrounded him. He could not afford to let that happen.
For someone who so desperately sought the approval of others, though, Wise could be extraordinarily pig-headed. At the first annual general meeting of the society, he was duly praised for his enthusiastic service in the print shop. ‘He has had control of all the society’s printing work, and has edited three of its reprints, and has, moreover, rendered most useful and highly valued aid,’ agreed the committee. But relations soon began to sour, with the ambitious young bibliophile proving increasingly difficult for Dr Furnivall and his fellow Shelleyans to control. Matters came to a head in 1887, with the curious case of Shelley’s Poems and Sonnets. The previous November, the Irish critic Edward Dowden had produced a new biography of Shelley, wherein was printed for the first time a series of unpublished poems from a newly unearthed manuscript. Wise thought these verses ought to be printed independently of Dowden’s biography, for which he received a tacit nod of approval from Rossetti and Forman. But they also suggested that he ask Lady Shelley before he proceeded, who, in Wise’s own words, ‘expressed dissent’, scuppering the plan.
And so he cooked up a new scheme. Instead of publishing the poems under his own name, he would publish them under the guise of ‘Charles Alfred Seymour’, a fictitious member of the equally fictitious Philadelphia Historical Society. The printers at Clay and Sons had learned not to ask too many questions. When Wise instructed them to alter the imprint to state that Poems and Sonnets was printed in Philadelphia, they did so without dissent. The request may have raised one or two eyebrows, but it was ultimately a small leap from printing facsimile books with earlier dates on them to printing a book with a false place of origin on the title page. Maybe Wise reassured them that the book was to be a facsimile of a supposed Philadelphian original. Maybe he claimed the books were going to be shipped over to America and sold there. In the end, Wise was a loyal customer and if Clay’s did not print the book somebody else surely would. Why not take the money and be done with it? Unbeknownst to the printers, the preface and texts of the poems had been copied wholesale from Dowden’s biography, much to the Irishman’s annoyance. Wise even had the cheek to send him a copy of the plagiarised book, to which Dowden replied with a sarcastic letter: ‘When a gentleman of the road makes you stand and deliver, and then courteously hands you back your purse, you can do no less than make a bow and say that he has the manners of a prince.’ Quite simply, for all his veneer of cordiality, Wise had behaved like a highwayman.
The degree to which Wise began to attract and dispense contempt was a good measure of his standing in the literary world. As he became more comfortable in his position and networks of influence, allowing his affected upper class tones to shake off his cockney vowels, he found it increasingly easy to sever friends and make enemies. Dowden was merely the first. Rossetti followed in 1888, after Wise produced an unsanctioned edition of Shelley’s unpublished correspondence. The letters in question belonged to a lawyer and collector called Henry J. Slack, who had granted Rossetti exclusive permission to reproduce them in some future publication for the Shelley Society. Wise had never been a patient man and refused to wait for approval. Under false pretence he borrowed Rossetti’s transcriptions and,
without his knowledge, copied them up for the printers. It was an outrageous, insolent deception and so, once again, Wise told his printers to supply a false imprint, this time stating that the book had been printed in New York.
Rossetti eventually found out, of course, when Wise tried and failed to buy the original letters. Wise protested that the publication of such documents was part of the core mission of the Shelley Society. Rossetti had been sitting on the transcripts and so, as a good scholar and Shelleyan, Wise had decided to take matters into his own hands. The older man was not amused. But he could do very little other than grumble to anyone who would listen, which few collectors were inclined to do. To Rossetti, Wise was an irritating flea. The only way to prevent him biting again was to crush him with a slap. The collectors saw Wise very differently: more songbird than pest. This brash young bibliophile may not have the most orthodox approach, they reasoned, but he was also responsible for making all those bijoux facsimiles and reprints which they liked so much. Few people had done more in recent years to slake their thirst for literary curiosities. What would be the point of clipping his wings now?
The printing shop was a place of many temptations. By the indulgence of his kindly mentor Dr Furnivall, young Wise had become the golden boy of the Shelley Society. He had been thrust into a position of trust—trust which he did not deserve. So far, his crimes had been limited to printing off odd copies and sidestepping inconvenient issues of consent and permission. But he had also spent his time absorbing every detail of how books were made, in the process discovering how easy it was to manipulate his fellow collectors and how credulous they were, how eager to get their hands on facsimile copies of terribly rare books they could never dream of owning. It was here, working with the printers at Clay’s, tinkering with the details of fonts and paper, that the seed of an idea planted itself deep in his mind.
